Discovery

I can't remember exactly when and where I first realized there was a problem in my head, but I remember the thought that led to the realization: "What's wrong with me?"

I had that thought a lot during later crashes, and it eventually changed from "what's wrong with me?" to "there's something wrong with me that keeps me from functioning" to "I'm not a good person". There has been no greater suffering than being paralyzed by a head spinning on the idea that I'm a bad person because of all the pain I'd created for myself and others.

The suffering was made worse by the certainty in my heart that I'm not a bad person.

During a crash I once had a realization about the judgments I was making against myself. I realized I was suffering the consequences of my words and actions, and those consequences are payment enough. Judging myself for yesterday's actions doesn't do anything to prevent future consequences, but accepting responsibility and internalizing the result will help me make better choices in the future.

Sometimes I brought so much pain into my life and lives of others that it was hard to convince myself I didn't need to "double pay", to suffer both the consequences and feel badly toward myself. Losing the love of a cherished person or missing out on a great opportunity wasn't enough, it felt right to wallow in self-loathing.

But not quite right. There was always a feeling, a sense that this was just indulgence. I started looking back at the actions for which I had the greatest judgments against myself. It wasn't very comfortable. But I learned something about why I'd done or said those things. I learned that if I went back to the exact moment when I'd made the choices that led to the regrets, I was always making the choice that at that time would give me the best chance of having the feeling of love or peace or presence. My subconscious was compelling me to do something that would let me, if even for a moment, cut through the blaring noise in my head and be aware in the moment. Unfortunately, my subconscious didn't care about the consequences of the actions, and those consequences usually led to me thinking I was a bad person.

The idea that being lost in my thoughts caused the stupid things I was doing might seem pretty obvious. What's less obvious is that being trapped in internal dialogue causes the things I do that help create more internal dialogue, and because of this the problem isn't that I'm doing stupid hurtful things - those words and actions are just the symptoms.

That's when I knew there was a problem, and that the problem was between my ears.